Documenting Palestinian Violations Of Human Rights is Just Too Darn Complicated

By the Palestinian Centre For Human Rights

When a rocket kills a Palestinian child, there is only one important question we rights organizations ask: who fired the weapon? Only if the answer is Israel do we then examine the myriad ways in which various Palestinian human rights have been violated. It’s a real time-saver.

Once upon a time, we would document all cases of Palestinians being killed. But that got complicated – you can’t make an effective argument that Israel is a uniquely brutal, inhumane aggressor when you also have to account for the significant number of casualties that Palestinian actions themselves cause. Maintaining statistics on victims whose misfortune did not result directly from Israeli military operations quickly emerged as a waste of both time and resources. So we simply don’t bother anymore.

We have developed a simple filter of whether or not a given incident involved Israeli armaments. If it did, then we duly document it and do what we can to raise an international uproar over continued Israeli disregard for Palestinian human rights. If a Palestinian rocket misfires and lands on a Palestinian home, that’s their own problem. Sorry, but we’ve got bigger fish to fry.

If a mysterious explosion rocks a Palestinian home and children are killed because  a militant’s bomb went off as he was trying to assemble it, our policy is silence; Palestinian rights are only important vis-à-vis Israel. Behaving otherwise would require us to have principles, and principles have no place in this arena. International donors aren’t interested in principles; our continued funding rests on providing donors what they want, which most assuredly does not involve good guys who aren’t really good.

We do always have the fallback of attributing all the problems in the Gaza Strip to the Israeli blockade. Except for the ones stemming from the Egyptian blockade, which we try as hard a we can to ignore, because Egyptians are Arabs, not Jews, and placing blame on Arabs would be too complex. Better to adhere to the Israel-bad/Palestinians-good narrative.

You asked about starving Palestinians in Syria? Well, can Israel be directly blamed? No? Then why are you bringing it up?